Bicultural Vida

This summer has included a multitude of events with my busy toddler including the way she has made sense of the exposure to several languages. I have watched her transform what once sounded like babble to actual words and to no one’s surprise she includes Spanish, English, and French in her speech (though mostly Spanish). What amazes me the most is how she is incorporating English into her linguistic repertoire. I have witnessed (as many SB readers probably have) howRead More ...

Do you ever wonder how your identity would be altered had you been born and raised in a different part of the country? The American Latino experience is vast indeed, but poignantly so when comparing the experiences of Latinos living on the polar coasts of our great nation. As a Cuban growing up in the beach suburbs of Los Angeles, many years before communities such as ours at SpanglishBaby existed, there was truly only one reality for the Latino experience:Read More ...

My six week trip home to Chile is coming to an end. This is by far the longest I have spent here in many, many years. In my last post I mentioned how happy I was to have my son hearing Spanish everywhere, improving his vocabulary and really practicing the language. But I also realized, that I a native speaker have also benefited from a complete language immersion. Spanish 100% of the time. No English whatsoever. No Spanglish, no fillingRead More ...

I am one of six children. Like so many Latino families, we look like a spectrum of skin colors from very light/white to dark brown. Unlike some Latino families, we all have dark hair and eyes. Some of us get confused for middle eastern or european. My hair, with it’s big curls, is generally what helps people place my ethnicity as Latino, much more than my light skin. When I had a Salvadoran passport, I had to check either “negro”Read More ...

  I read with great interest the Wall Street Journal article featured in Spanglishbaby’s Week in Links regarding parents who move to China so that their children can learn and improve their language abilities. Learning another language and experiencing another culture can be a great experience for anyone, and it is especially valuable for children who tend to have an advantage at second language acquisition. The question that I was left with after reading the article was: Why Chinese? NoneRead More ...

Over the weekend, my husband and I had a freelance television production gig and we got to meet a pretty neat Mexican family. The story they shared with us for the TV program we were working for has nothing to do with bilingualism, but I had to conduct all the interviews in Spanish and I must say I was very impressed by how well it was spoken by the children in the family. What surprised me the most is thatRead More ...

My good friend Sisi — the mastermind behind our Spanish book club — has been hosting a Fourth of July parade for the kids for the past three years. I had never been able to take my kids because of work until this year… and I’m so happy we finally did. The kids had a blast decorating their bikes and wagons and when everyone was ready Sisi turned on the Sousa marches (that reminded me so much of my dad)Read More ...

I’ve had ample quality time with my stepdaughters this summer, which means I’ve been watching them interact with my son in surprisingly bilingual ways. The girls are 12 and 10 years old, entrenched in English at school and accustomed to using Spanish only at their abuelos’ house. One of them is much more comfortable with Spanish than the other and it sometimes appears that they have rejected the language altogether, but observing their play with my 4-year-old tells a differentRead More ...